Jude Nutter | Writers.com https://writers.com/instructor/jude-nutter Your voice is a gift. Share it. Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:25:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 Opening the Door to Poetry https://writers.com/course/opening-the-door-to-poetry Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:20:34 +0000 https://writers.com/?post_type=product&p=15036 How do we use poetry to express life's marvelous complexity? Learn how to control language beyond the "ordinary" and discover the many possibilities of poetry.

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]]> What skills do we need to acquire if we are to express, in words, something of our marvelous complexity? How do we manipulate and control language to create something that seems beyond expression in “ordinary” words? What (and where) is this other world, this metaphorical space that poetry opens?

This workshop is an introduction to the craft of poetry; it is designed to help you explore and answer the questions posed above. During the workshop we will look closely at some of the defining characteristics of poetry—the line and stanza, images, rhythm and sound, the dynamics of tone and point of view, the interplay of movement and stillness, and the difficult, critical work of revision. We will begin to uncover the relationship between form and content and come to understand how a poem’s pacing, music, imagery, line length, and syntax enable its emotion; how, essentially, the poem creates its “argument” and emotional content through its structure. 

Each week, via the Wet Ink platform, I will share an essay and/or two craft poems (with initial questions to help focus your explorations), and a weekly writing prompt (with instructions). Initial thoughts and reactions to the readings and craft poems begin on Wet Ink, but a weekly two hour Zoom meeting will be the place where we discuss your ideas and insights in more depth. The Zoom meeting is also the place where you can receive feedback on your own poems generated by the weekly prompts: this is where you can get real-time responses and suggestions from the whole group in a safe and supportive environment.

I have deliberately defined this experience as a workshop rather than a class because the word “workshop” implies saws, noise, grease, and dust; implies that the work itself, the making, is the pleasure! Poetry is a process, a voyage of discovery, full of serious play and rewarding labour. The title of the workshop has, of course, two possible readings, and the door opens both ways: by becoming more fluent and adept in the reading of poems you will open doors into new subjects and possibilities, and this fluency in and mastery of craft will allow the mysterious animal that is poetry to step through that door and enter your own creations so that they become an embodiment of (not just a statement about) an idea or feeling. Poetry, after all, is alive: let’s open the door!

Learning and Writing Goals

  • Explore the relationship between form/structure and content in poems
  • Explore the main aspects of poetic craft
  • Gain confidence in the ability to manipulate language to craft poems that reveal and enact their subject.
  • Encourage the development of a sustainable poetic practice, which involves close reading, daily/weekly generative writing, and a commitment to revision.
  • Create a portfolio of at least 6 new works/drafts of poems
  • Receive poem feedback from peers and the instructor in a weekly Zoom workshop
  • Provide various strategies for revision (essentially “re-visioning”) of initial drafts

Weekly Zoom Schedule

Opening the Door to Poetry will meet Thursdays from 5:00-7:00 pm US Eastern Time.

Zoom sessions will be two hours in length.

Syllabus

Week One: To Break or Not to Break: The Line

The line as your most powerful and problematic tool. What is the relationship between the line and the sentence in free verse poetry? How do free verse lines create and maintain their music, pacing, and the reader’s interest? The power and function of enjambment. Introduction to meter.

Week Two: The Poem’s Rooms: The Stanza

What is the stanza? Why do some poets break the block of the text into sections leaving areas of white space on the page? Among other things, stanzas help organize and pace a poem and can indicate subtle shifts in tone or direction.

Week Three: Working the Image

Images in poetry can be both literal and figurative. But what do we mean when we talk about a “figurative image” in poetry? And why are figurative images so powerful? A look at how images, both literal and figurative, can direct a reader toward insight; at how poets choose and arrange their images in the service of the poem.

Week Four: Motion and Stillness: The Lyric and the Narrative

The lyric in poetry is associated with feelings or experiences; the narrative is, of course, concerned with story, but the lyric and narrative are not absolutes: most poems move back and forth between the narrative “pull” and the lyric “moment.” The look at the concept of the “ghost of the narrative” in the lyric and at the narrative poem under “lyric pressure”.

Week Five: The Joy of Form: Sestina, Villanelle, Accentual and Syllabic Verse

A look at two traditional poetic forms (sestina and villanelle). Writing in form is a challenge and can send you down interesting paths as it forces you to rethink your syntax and diction to “fit the form”. A look at poems that structure and pace the poem through stresses and syllable count.

Week Six: Re-visioning/Revision and the Importance of Titles

What do you do when a poem comes to grinding halt, backs itself into a corner; when you feel you have lost the impulse and the music that initiated the poem in the first place? True revision as a re-visioning of the poem’s potential.

What about titles? Titles are not simple “tacked onto” a poem: they are one of the poem’s vital working parts. An exploration of strategies for finding the “right” kind of title for your poems.

Week Seven: Who’s talking? Point of View and Tone

A shift in point of view shifts the tone and focus of a poem, but why? An exploration of the different “relationships” that occur between (1) the reader and the poem, (2) the reader and the speaker, and (3) the poem and the speaker when we shift points of view.

Week Eight: A Good Send-off: The Importance of Closure

A poem, of course, must end/close at some point, but what makes a successful closure? Successful closure (like a successful title) is never “tacked onto” a poem. A look at various ways of closing a poem through content (subject) and structure.

Why Take a Poetry Writing Course with Writers.com?

  • We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
  • Small groups keep our online writing courses lively and intimate.
  • Work through your weekly lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
  • Share and discuss your work with fellow writers in a supportive course environment.
  • Award-winning instructor Jude Nutter will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

 

Click the Enroll Now button below, enter your details on the Checkout page,
and reserve your spot in the course.

Original price was: $545.00.Current price is: $465.00.Enroll Now

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